Zburătorul

I love reaching back into the collective national past and reading old folklore, don't you? By rights, I should've known about this myth in school, but then, I always had trouble paying attention. The first time I was made conscious of it was two or three years ago when someone likened a short text I'd written to this old story. Looking back after all this time, I can see why.

Psyche revived by Cupid's Kiss by Antonio Canova, Paris, Louvre src

Mitul Zburătorului, the Myth of the Flyer (what a crude, insufficient translation) is a story laden with meaning that's permeated much of Romanian culture. It's a bizarre story, the story of this winged, dark, and charming man who at night would sneak into unmarried girls' bedrooms and ravage them. Bite them, torture them, though it's understood by way this story is remembered that it's a pleasant sort of torture, a bittersweet pain that spills over into pleasure. Once the girl is seduced, and bitten, she falls under a sort of spell. She loses her strength, becomes bed-ridden, and must be cured by the (female) elders of the village. At its core, it's a warning, the bare-boned story tells us this man is a devil. A bad man one should keep away from.

But that's not how the story is usually remembered.

Aye, there are elder methods, balms and potions to keep this monstrous seducer at bay. In some versions of the story, the girl, the victim, complains, bemoans her fate to her mother, begging to be relieved, spared. Ideally, the mother or the other female elders of the village equip the girl with a balm to rub or plants to hang around the windows and doors, to protect the house from this night creature.

However, those are only secondary methods of protection. By far the most efficient and recommended is for the girl to turn down the seducer's advances. See, it's understood that there's a twin devil in the girl's heart that will eventually give in. I've always loved that bit because it's so real, so un-moralistic. All you have to do, it tells you, is say no. Except at the same time, it recognizes how hard it sometimes is to say no.

It's a story of warning for young girls who are just discovering lust, but it's also a great song of unrequited love. One Romanian writer, Ion Heliade Rădulescu, beautifully explains this sentiment as "an untellable longing" that comes over the girl once she's been seduced. As with all unrequited love affairs, the lover has no choice but to fade away slowly, bemoaning his fate and hoping against hope that the object of his affection will eventually return to him.

"On the morn, she marvels at the torn strands,
Her lips in the mirror raw and purple -
Smiling and sorrowful, she looks on, as her mouth whispers:
Oh winged stranger with dark hair, steal me away tonight again."

*I've amended some bits for context. It's a fragment of "Călin", a poem by another Romanian writer and our greatest national poet, Mihai Eminescu (a fantastic character in his own right).

Typically, it's the girl who falls in love with the Zburător (sorry, I can't call him Flyer - it's lame), though in some versions, it's the other way around. Though he is a creature of myth, he will on occasion fall for a human child (since these girls in these myths are really just children, aren't they?).

More than a representation of unrequited love, the myth is a metaphor for the union of heaven and earth, and it's an extremely powerful image. The man, the spirit, the ethereal, comes down and seduces that which is on the earth, grounded, receiving, birthing. Because it is something we can not consciously see, these seductions can only happen at night.

He is said to be a maladaptive, evil spirit. Yet at the same time, protection against him is shoddy and falls on the girl alone. There is the suggestion, throughout all these myths, that if she's not careful, she will be caught. And meet the beyond. Be drawn into this transformative experience full of suffering, but also of great spiritual magnitude.

It's no wonder that artists have time and again made of this myth a bittersweet love song.

"I look for you, but oceans break apart into nothing
I beg you, take me away in flight
Another time
You were never real
Only in my mind
The Zburător in the stories
Ended up in mine [...]
Was I just like anyone, how could you forget me?"

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I don't know why I told you all that. I just think it's interesting. It's a story very dear to me, with some very personal connections, so I come back to it periodically and marvel at how much mythology explains what we're living down here.